Water, Electricity Rationing Crippling Businesses In Tamale

While still battling with a wave of deadly robbery attacks, residents of Tamale, the Northern Regional capital, have been hit with water and power rationing which is beginning to have disastrous effects on businesses and activities of residents.

Taps have refused to flow for weeks leaving swaths of the city without running water and forcing people to resort to water sourced from polluted dams and ponds for domestic purposes.

Women and students walk distances to struggle for dirty water with thirsty animals in the devastating situation that the Water Company have been flatly unable to offer convincing cause.

The Northern Electricity Department (NED) of the Volta River Authority has also failed to distribute uninterrupted electricity power to consumers for nearly three months now since fire ravaged a GridCo substation destroying all eleven feeders on November 21, last year.

The power distributor has failed to replace the broken feeders and managed in place temporary measures which has obviously run out of steam, igniting frequent outages for almost eight weeks now.

On Saturday, December 16, 2017, there was a total power outage from 8am to 4pm in the entire metropolis and GridCo said it was to allow repair work at the Bulk Supply Point in Techiman.

VRA NEDco failed to supply power to the metropolis again on Sunday, February 4, 2018 citing a Control Room fault, then on Wednesday, February 7, power went off from 8.00am to 11.00am.

The outages continued into Thursday where more than 12 suburbs slept without power and on Friday, power went out for more than three times unannounced and was restored midnight.

On Saturday, power again went off multiple times before NEDco VRA came later to explain that an underground cable challenge has caused some feeders malfunctioned, and just yesterday, Sunday 11, there was total blackout from 7am to 11am and went off twice again at around 6.30pm before some residents went to sleep without power.

In all instances, power is taken before a public notice issued which is now becoming an unbearable situation in the sprawling city of about 37,000 households and businesses.

Muntari Shani, a 30-year old welder at Kukuo said the frequent power blackout has damaged his machine he bought at GH3,000 and said he couldn’t sleep because he always thought about his tools left behind in his shop.

“Today, the machine has broken down (sic). Yesterday night…you know, I on it before day break it will charge full and because I was in the house during that night, they gave light out, I couldn’t go back to my work side and that make a problem, my machine is now down,” he said, before fuming that “Tamale, they don’t take us to be people at all; they can just get up and give lights off.”

Kwame Nasiru, a cold store sales clerk at Moshie Zongo said warm temperatures due to the outages has caused his products in the coolers to perish and also complained that the situation was disrupting businesses.

“My meat and my fish got spoilt (sic) yesterday because of the lights off. Now I don’t even know how I will manage to pay the debt I collect from my suppliers. So this lights off, in fact the electricity people or whoever are behind it please you have to inform us giving us the lights off so that we can know how to manage our things”

“Even the water too, the same problem. Tamale, I don’t why. Now we are facing water problem, lights problem,” frustrated Nasiru laments.